By Elizabeth Yeager Cross
WV Design Team
Jessica and Tyler Dawson live in the “Dream Home” in Scott Depot’s Cobblestone development. They are a young couple who have been married just over a year and a half and are clients of mine at Yeager Design & Interiors.
After purchasing the “Dream Home,” they began filling it with the furniture and accessories they had accumulated over the years. Occasionally, Jessica would stop into our showroom looking for art and other items, and over time I began to get to know this absolutely stunningly beautiful woman.
Over a year after we first met, Jessica asked if I could come out and do a home consult and we booked her first appointment. She expressed a need for a finished look and feel and that she was missing that “wow factor.”
Upon entering the Dawsons’ home, I could tell that the couple had beautiful taste and lived in a quality home. The floor plan was open and airy and large-scale windows bathed the living and dining rooms in sunlight. The stone fireplace was a intricate design feature that paired neatly with the wood flooring and white trim work.
As Jessica showed me around the downstairs, I noticed their need for finishing touches, along with some furniture scale issues. Jessica was not happy with their current oversized sofa and chair combination. She wanted a high-quality sofa that was a more manageable size for the space and to break up some of the leather with an upholstered accent chair.
She was also in need of a solution to her DVR storage situation. All of the wires from the flat screen TV were run to the side of the fireplace, which left the DVR box on the floor and exposed. New chandeliers and finishing touch accents were also added to our list of needs, and our next appointment was booked.
My extremely talented designer Maria Belcher and I set out and began our design adventure for the Dawsons’ project. Gathering items from High Point Market as well as many gorgeous accents from our showroom, we loaded them into our trucks and began our staging installation. We asked that Jessica resign to another area in the home to let us do our work, and she happily agreed.
About an hour later, we asked her to come down for her big reveal. She stood on the cusp of her living room with her hands on her face and her eyes bright and wide and gasped. Her room had been transformed into a romantic, soft getaway filled with touches of candlelight, photographs, and metallic accents. Her once oversized sofa was replaced with a tailored, plush three-seater.
The fabric was a blend of gray and silver that, when the light hit it, gave off a sheen that accented the crisp white toss pillows. One of the leather chairs had been replaced with a classic wide stripe upholstered chair with exposed warm wood turned arms.
High in the vaulted ceiling, a new wine-barrel wood chandelier illuminated all of the objects below with specialty Edison bulbs. The fireplace was now flanked on each side with reclaimed wood pine three-drawer chests with Bluestone tops.
They not only served as tabletops for magnificent gold and glass lamps, but also were the solution to the DVR storage situation. A hole was drilled in the back of the cabinet for the wiring and the bottom drawer became the hidden storage component.
Custom wooden urns were hand painted using Chalk Paint by Annie Sloan to hold a pop of green in moss orbs. We also custom painted an existing carved wooden tray and finished it off with touches of silver and gold wax to host a trio of mercury glass candlesticks that held timer programmed candles with petrified driftwood woven between them.
To complement all of the couple’s beautiful photography of their wedding day, we installed framed bold black and white “Mr. & Mrs.” text in the room to help remind them daily of their new life together. To add a touch of glimmer, gold and silver accents like gold foil-bound books, a gold spiked orb and a silver cache peanut were strewn about the room.
The dining room was also under transformation. A new wood and metal orb chandelier was installed over a fabulous gold-plated candelabra with 20 arms. To fill the void of an empty corner, an antique gold and mirrored bar cart was placed with some of their initialed glassware and soft white faux flowers in a mirrored vase. Aged wrought iron sconces were placed on each side of the large window to bring more touches of candlelight to the romantic dining setting.
Across the bar top in to the kitchen, we filled each glass topper cabinet with an accent of gold or silver unusual objects. We at Yeager Design & Interiors like to call these pieces “weirds.” Often in rooms that we design, you can find little weird objects that can be conversation pieces such as a golden whale tale, or a silver angular orb, and even sometimes a ceramic glove form.
In a recent sit-down with Jessica, I asked her what her favorite part of working with Yeager Design & Interiors was. Her simple reply was, “Every part of it! Of. Every. Single. Room.” She also shared that it was nice to have the reveal at the end of the day. She had feared that working with a designer would be a daunting task and was relieved that it was so easy to have everything brought to her home and finished in one day.
She commented that this Christmas season was so much more magical than the last and that they shared coffee, watched Christmas movies, and got to enjoy their tree much more this year because they wanted to be in that room. I asked her what the scariest part of working with a designer was and she said, “I was afraid to use gold and silver accents in my home together and I can’t believe how great it really turned out. It just makes everything warmer. I love it when a plan comes together.”
If you are interested in working with a designer this new year, know that it is always good to make a list of the spaces you want addressed, your budget to address them, and to keep an open mind for the results to come.
– To see more pictures of the projects featured in this article: Dawson Home
– To read the full article: https://yeagerdesignandinteriors.com/article